During a welding process (e.g., an arc welding process), contaminants such as fumes can be generated which, if breathed in by a welder, can be harmful to the welder. In many welding situations (especially indoor situations), ventilation equipment is used to draw up and vent away the fumes. However, sometimes the ventilation equipment may be inadequate for a particular welding process or scenario, or the ventilation equipment may not be properly set up or properly used by the welder. Because safety and health regulations tend to be performance based, compliance with industrial hygiene standards is dependent upon having actual workplace exposure determinations made by a qualified industrial hygienist. Current practice is to perform a full shift monitoring where a sampling device is placed on the worker to filter and collect a representative sample of the contaminants present in the worker's breathing zone. The goal is to obtain an eight hour time-weighted average concentration which may then be compared with the allowable levels in the regulations. However, many times, results cannot be obtained until several weeks after the sampling event as it is often necessary to send the samples to an accredited lab for analysis.
Further limitations and disadvantages of conventional, traditional, and proposed approaches will become apparent to one of skill in the art, through comparison of such approaches with embodiments of the present invention as set forth in the remainder of the present application with reference to the drawings.